'Longmire' Season 2: Robert Taylor returns as 'old-school' sheriff

If Sheriff Walt Longmire suddenly turns into a chatterbox,
Robert Taylor will be the first to worry.

The Australian actor is quite comfortable embodying novelist
Craig Johnson's Wyoming lawman of few words as the title character in
"Longmire," the Monday A&E mystery series that begins its second season Monday (May 27).

"It was very exciting to get the pickup," Taylor tells
Zap2it. "You never know, but it's great. I've done series before, and most of them never make it to a second season. And we hope we'll be here for quite a bit."

That's entirely possible, since "Longmire" launched last summer as A&E's top-rated original series premiere up to that time. (It's been topped since by
"Bates Motel.")

"I felt it was a little different," Taylor says of his modern Western, "more distilled and languid and not as frenetic as some other shows. You always hope that you'll connect with people and that they'll stick with it, so we had our fingers crossed."

Taylor notes that this season, Longmire remains very much the troubled widower father and challenged officeholder he was initially.

"He's still searching for something," the actor says. "I don't know that he knows he is, but he's been changed fundamentally by losing his wife. It's pretty much destroyed him, but he just soldiers on. He doesn't understand these feelings he's having, this quiet desperation."

Indeed, adds Taylor, Longmire is "an old-school guy, and he just deals with stuff the only way he knows how. He doesn't have a lot of equipment or counseling; he just does what most people do ... he keeps moving.

"Sometimes when they hand me a new script and I read it, I'll think, 'Huh. I thought this guy didn't talk too much.' Usually, it's 'Yup' or 'Nope.' He's a very stoic character."